The elimination round is over and it's time to start the race! The podracers below are ordered by the rankings from the qualifying races, but this lineup does not reflect the final ranks at all... who knows who will survive and who will crash and burn. It's a treacherous course and we have some fierce competitors. This is only the first of three laps (each lap pertaining to a two day forum poll) - and in each lap you will have FIVE votes to pick up to the five best entries. Their progress is completely up to you - the forum members. Each pods progress will be the total votes it's received through the course of the three lap race, and this will determine the winners in the end.

To mix up the votes, in this first lap you are to pick the five "best built" podracers. That way we're not just asking for your favorite three times in a row. You can figure out what exactly "best built" entails.

Oh, and one last detail: because of how dangerous the course is it's expected that the 7 pods ranked the worst won't make it to the second lap! So be careful out there, and start your engines!

1 : 2 : 3 : 4 :

5 : 6 : 7 : 8 :

9 : 10: 11: 12:

13: 14: 15: 16:

17: 18: 19: 20:

21: 22: 23: 24:

25: 26: 27: 28:

29: 30: 31:

(We had a tie for sixth in one of the qualifying polls so we've got 31 racers instead of 30).

That collage would not have been possible without Pepa Quin cutting out all the entry pics for me... if only everyone had submitted transparent .png files as their entry pics - would have saved us both a lot of time and complaining.

Well I was lucky enough to just scrape in to equal last place on the grid for the main race - but with a quarter of the first lap over things are not looking good... Oh well - all I can say is that if Pepa Quin is going to be photoshopping the demise of those that don't get through to the second lap, or if Don is going to provide commentry, I hope that my little classic space pilot survives - no crash please, just those retro classic space engines puttering out and stalling maybe? Bum! I should have gone for neo classic space instead of retro. Anyway, there is always next year!

legobatmanbatmobile has been disqualified for the following of reasons:

- spamming members of our forum to try and gain votes- spamming members after being told not to do so

This is essentially a violation of our no advertising rule. After some discussion between staff members on what actions to take, we've decided to immediately disqualify his entry in the contest, issue a warning to legobatmanbatmobile, and ban him/her from the next 4 future building contests including ones already in progress.

We'll leave his entry up for this lap only because removing that option from the poll and his entry would mess everything up. Besides, he would have crashed and burned anyway.

While soliciting other members for votes was not explicitly declared illegal, we had hoped that common sense would dictate to not do so. Publicly soliciting votes through this board, its messaging system, #fbtb channel in IRC, and the FBTB: flickr Outpost will be prohibited. We will now make sure this clearly outlined on all contests going forward.

well if I had a hat on while typing this, I would tip it to pepa for his superb photoshopping, making all our pods look so awesome together (sorry about my background ). I also want to shout a big THANK YOU to all the staff, for all the work that has very clearly gone into this, you guys have put out a great contest.

Blackninjatom wrote:well if I had a hat on while typing this, I would tip it to pepa for his superb photoshopping, making all our pods look so awesome together (sorry about my background ). I also want to shout a big THANK YOU to all the staff, for all the work that has very clearly gone into this, you guys have put out a great contest.